


Ahead of the Pack

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Anthropomorphic, Crossover, Fluff, Gen, I just wanted to make Reid TINY, Slice of Life, Team as Animals, silliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-14
Packaged: 2018-07-15 02:07:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7201823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her new boss is a wolf, the IT tech is an ewe with bright red fleece, and the media liaison is the prettiest fox-looking... <em>something</em>... that Emily Prentiss has ever seen. But nothing really compares to the collection of absolute weirdness that is her new partner, Dr. Spencer Reid. </p>
<p>All one point seven feet of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ahead of the Pack

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so basically all you need to know about Zootopia to read this is that they're anthropomorphic animals (so clothes, hind legs, opposable thumbs, all that jazz) living in harmony in this big ol' city together. And you need to go watch it right now because it is amazing.

Emily’s new boss is a wolf.

Yay.

He stares at her with his ears sharply pointed and brow furrowed, and there’s the barest hint of confusion showing on the curve of his muzzle. She tries to smile and ends up baring her teeth at him awkwardly. Up goes up an eyebrow in response.

Double yay. He’s stoic.

Stoic is _no_ fun.

“Can I help you?” he says finally, tapping the case file he had been flicking through twice on the desk to straighten the edges before laying them gently down. His claws click on the wood as he folds his paws, waiting patiently for her answer.

“Well, I was hoping you could show me where to put my stuff!” she says, and up goes the other eyebrow. She keeps smiling, feeling it turn slightly frantic as her whiskers tremble with the effort not to twitch. Her arms ache around the box she’s holding. She’s barely been here five minutes and this is already the worst first day _ever_.

“There’s been a mistake,” he says finally, standing. She notes with a sort of resigned determinedness that his dark fur is impeccably groomed, right down to the small curl of his ruff over the collar of his suit. _Control issues,_ she thinks, noting that careful perfection. _Doesn’t trust woman,_ she thinks again, as his tail bristles ever so slightly.

There’s a knock at the door and a strangely elegant fox-like creature with pale fur pokes her snout through, smiling kindly at them. _Maned wolf,_ Emily realizes, after a long moment of thinking. Gorgeous. And rare. “Excuse me,” the maned wolf says, her beautiful ears twitching forwards in interest at the sight of Emily. “We’re getting started.”

Her new boss (SSA Hotchner, says the shiny nameplate on his door) smiles back at her and the smile reaches his eyes. Emily amends her profile.

_Doesn’t trust cats,_ she thinks, and hardens her expression.

She’ll prove him wrong.

She belongs here.

“Let me introduce you to the team,” the maned wolf (JJ. Her name is JJ) says after Hotchner dismisses them with an air of ‘leave so I can call someone to complain about this’, and Emily follows her down the hall with her eyes locked on the dark ridge of fur down the nape of her neck.

“Thank you,” Emily says politely, because JJ seems nice and Emily’s got her back up after her disastrous meeting with Hotchner, so she’s not entirely sure how to deal with _nice_.

JJ pauses with her paw on the door handle and swallows. “We’re a close-knit team,” she says finally, softly, and Emily wonders if it’s an explanation or a warning. “And doing this work, this job… we’re not so good with surprises. Hotch especially.”

“Thank you,” Emily says again, because she can tell this is JJ welcoming her. She’s grateful for that. And then the door opens, and her new team is there. Well, two of them. She cranes her neck back to peer up into the soft eyes of the cape buffalo looming over her.

“Hi,” she says.

The answering smile is wide and excited. “Ooh new person, _hello_ ,” he says with a laugh and an almost flirty smile, and JJ rolls her eyes at him. “Hey there. Welcome to the team.”

“Down, Morgan,” JJ says, tapping his arm, and he leans back with a deep chuckle. “Agent Prentiss, meet Agent Morgan. Pay no attention to him, he’s all bark and no bite.”

“Oh honey,” says the other occupant of the room. “I assure you, he is _all_ bite.” She winks, and Morgan chuckles again. Emily blinks. There’s a ewe flirting with a buffalo. A ewe with her wool dyed bright red and what appears to be half a trinket shop woven through her fleece. This new job is going to be a weird one, Emily can already tell. Emily feels dizzy, sidling across to an empty seat and sitting down before it can, somehow, get weirder.

And then she meets team member #5.  

“Oh, hi,” says a throaty voice to her left. When she turns in her seat to look, the space is empty. She blinks then looks again, just to be sure. “Um… down here.” She looks down. Then, she looks _downer_.

A shadow looms over her as Morgan leans around to peer over her shoulder. “Hey kid,” he booms in her ear, and it’s a struggle not to twitch out of her chair. “Meet Agent Prentiss. Our newbie. Prentiss, this is our resident genius, _Agent_ Spencer Reid.” Spencer Reid grins awkwardly at her, his feet tucked together and ears hidden behind his head. Emily stares. Morgan is emphasising the _Agent_ because Spencer Reid is… well, he’s a—

“You’re a rabbit,” she says in shock, because sometimes her mouth runs away with her and _come on, a fucking rabbit?_ In the ZBI? He could stand on one of her paws and have room left over. His damn _gun_ is almost bigger than he is, hanging awkwardly at his hip, and he’s wearing a sweater vest over a faded purple shirt with a crooked tie dotted with smiling carrots to complete the whole ensemble.

He coughs and rubs his paw over his muzzle, nose twitching frantically. “Hare,” he corrects after what appears to be a vicious internal battle, before straightening his back and affirming, “ _Lepus europaeus_. It’s a… common misconception, actually.” Black tipped ears flick upwards then sink back down as he meets her gaze. “Um. Yeah. Sorry… I’m a hare. Close though. Sort of.”

“Sorry,” she says, and nudges the chair out with her hind paw. “I should have asked. If it makes you feel better, people always miss-species me as well.”

“Panther,” Morgan says with a laugh that says _easy_ , the same time JJ says, “Black leopard?” with an uncertain upward inflection to the end of her voice.

“Melanistic jaguar,” Reid says, bracing his paws on the chair and heaving himself up, white tipped tail flashing as his paws slip on the over-smooth wood. Even standing upright, he still has to peer to see over the table. “Your rosettes are bigger than a leopards’, and they have spots in the centre that a leopards’ would lack. Black panther is also correct, but… problematic.” He meets her gaze out of the corner of his wide, hazel eyes, and she can’t help but like him. She’s always been a sucker for the scrappy ones. But she’s here to do a job, not make friends.

That won’t change.

 

* * *

 

“You’re angry.”

She can practically taste the anxiety emanating from the passenger seat as she focuses on breathing and not digging her claws into the steering wheel. The traffic light ahead stays obstinately red, extending this car ride by an agonising amount. “I’m not angry,” she lies. The light flicks green. The car shudders slightly under her as she puts her paw down just a _little_ bit too hard. “Why would I be angry?”

Reid squeaks, and when she glances down at him his paws are gripping the door tightly. “Because you feel like you’re being benched,” he says, peeling his paws from the handle tentatively and settling back into the seat, the belt almost covering his belly. “Because you feel like you’re being underestimated.” He pauses, and his nose begins twitching. She’s noticed he does that when he’s thinking too hard. He’s _always_ thinking too hard.

“Hotch is keeping me out the field on purpose,” she says finally, tapping the indicator on. “He’s… angry I got transferred in under his nose.”

Reid hums and inches across the seat, dragging the casefile into his lap and studying it. “You know,” he says, “I can tell that the reason you’re upset is because he’s partnered you with me. You feel handicapped.”

_Shit._

“That’s not true,” she lies again.

“You don’t have to protect me,” Reid tells her firmly. “You’re angry about being underestimated, I understand that. But you’re doing the exact same to me. I’m good at my job.” She’s not sure if she believes him. But, for a while, Reid proves himself right. Case after case passes by and as Hotch relaxes around her, she relaxes around Reid. He _is_ good at his job.

None of them can keep up with his mind, and he almost outpaces them all on foot as well. Not that she knows that until the day an unsub clobbers her over the head with a two-by-four before bolting. Before she can even shout, _“Freeze, dirt-bag!”_ a small shadow rockets over her from a standing start and overtakes the fleeing tiger. The fucking _tiger._ The man is bigger than _she_ is—even Morgan would be close to outclassed!

“FBI, stand down,” Reid says calmly, drawing himself to his full size (all one point seven feet of him), and aiming his gun calmly at the tiger’s heart. Something in her throat drops heavily into her gut, but the tiger takes that moment to lunge forward with a snarl ( _you’re dead, rabbit!)_ and Reid shoots him. Dead eye. Right in the heart.

“Did Hotch teach you to shoot like that?” she asks as they wait for backup by the cooling body. Reid is jiggling, hind paw tapping against the floor, and she can tell he’s not at all happy with the outcome of this case. But he’s in one piece, unharmed, and despite the sticky lump on the back of her skull that she keeps poking at, she’s pretty damn pleased with all of that.

The tapping of his paw pauses for a beat before he answers. “Yes,” he says finally, running his thumb over the butt of his gun. “It was a condition of me working for him. I had to hit a bullseye ten times out of ten. It… took a while.”

“Ten times out of ten?” _Christ._ “Perfectionist much? I’d have let you off with a nine outta ten, at least.”

For a wolf, Hotch moves quieter than she does. “If he takes out nine, the tenth one gets him,” he says coolly. “What’s your shooting like, Agent Prentiss?”

His face is expressionless. “Not ten out of ten,” she admits, squaring her shoulders and standing up straight so they’re eye to eye. No cat ever backed down from a dog, and she doesn’t plan to either.

“It will be,” he says, and walks away. She wonders if he’s kidding.

He wasn’t. Hotch gets her out on the firing range, and he works her hard. He works her until her ears ache and her fur is manky with sweat and she can’t barely focus on the target through the burning in her eyes. He works her _beyond_ that point, until she can hit the target drop-dead exhausted and almost blind and sure as fuck not at her peak, and then he tells her that they’re going to do it again tomorrow. And the next day. And the _next._ She goes home, sinks into a hot bath, and considers that maybe that this job isn’t worth it after all. But Emily Prentiss has never backed down from a challenge, and especially not one that a freaking _hare_ pushed through.

When she gets there after work the next day, she’s early and there’s no sign of Hotch. Instead, there’s a familiar shape waiting, paging quickly through a book with his eyes barely pausing as they skate across the page.

“Reid?” she asks, looking down at him. He looks up and grins, putting the book aside. _Silence of the Lambs._ She shivers.

“Figured maybe you’d… um. Like a… want a friend?” he asks, gesturing to his gun and then flushing. Down go the ears. “I mean, a partner. A helper. To help you, get better for… Hotch.” He stares at her feet and she doesn’t answer until he lifts his gaze nervously to peer up at her.

“I’d love a friend,” she says, rashly and probably regrettably, but he beams and it turns out she doesn’t regret it at all. “Need a boost to see the target?”

“Nope,” he says cheerfully, and leaps up in a single easy bound, snapping safety goggles over his eyes and blinking out at her through the magnified lenses. Then he lectures her about guns and the history of guns and the physics behind it all for three hours. _Straight_.

She doesn’t even mind.

 

* * *

 

“So, Prentiss, want me to help find you a man?” Morgan is stone cold sober but he’s also silly with the night, and she can’t help but choke out a laugh that’s almost a bark at the stupid grin on his face. “Look at all these fine cats around, surely one must meet your no doubt incredibly high standards?” A glance around the bar shows her enough assorted animal species to fill an alphabet book and only two felines. Neither of whom are her type at _all_. At least Morgan is eternally optimistic.

“ _Leopardus pajeros,_ ” Reid says, peering at the small wildcat shouting at the TV hanging over the bar. “I don’t think he’s your type, Emily. He’s an investment banker.”

“Also, tiny,” JJ says, smirking. “Em, you could crush him with a paw. He’s more your size, Spence.”

“Well, what about…” Morgan begins, turning and gesturing at the other feline in the room. Emily sighs, sensing the conversation veering wildly off course, and turns to talk to JJ—the _only_ sensible one there—before she gets dragged into the childishness of it all. “Hey, that one’s cute.”

Reid has to lean even further back to see around Morgan, almost toppling the phonebooks they’d begged from the bar manager to pile onto his chair. “ _Panthera leo,_ ” he chirps cheerily, then frowns. “Morgan…”

“Hey man, don’t judge, she could be into the ladies. And that is a _lovely_ lioness. What a rump.”

Emily stands hurriedly, knocking Reid’s stool, which wobbles dangerously before she steadies it with a paw. “And with that, I’m getting another drink. Anyone need anything?”

“The barmaid’s number?” Morgan again. _Eternally_ optimistic. Emily sighs and scans the bar. She doubts he means the otter, which leaves the…

“That’s a rabbit, Morgan,” she says, double-taking. “You want a rabbit’s number?”

“Oh boy,” Reid mumbles, sinking lower onto the stool until only the tips of his ears are showing—an impressive feat, considering they’re almost longer than the rest of him. “Em, please don’t.”

“You’ll thank me later,” Morgan assures him, poking him back upright.

She can feel Reid’s plaintive gaze following her all the way across the bar, lingering long after she orders her drinks and pays and decidedly does _not_ harass the poor barmaid for her cell number, Morgan be damned. When Reid is ready to flirt—and _that’s_ an unsettling mental image—she’s sure he’s plenty capable of doing it himself. He’s got backbone, hidden under the nose twitching and cardigans.

When she gets back and slides the drinks around the table, Reid is happily showing JJ a magic trick. “Can you pull a rabbit out of a hat?” she teases him, firmly ignoring Morgan’s questioning glance at the barmaid or his raised eyebrow.

“Only if you want the rabbit to feed you the hat,” Reid replies with false sweetness, and pulls a coin out of JJ’s tail.

Yep. Kid’s got plenty of backbone.

For a hare, anyway.

 

* * *

 

It only takes her four months to realize this isn’t a team at all, at least not one like what she’s ever worked in before. It’s a _family_.

It’s New Years and they’ve invited her out to celebrate. She’s standoffish when sober and awkward once tipsy, but that all begins to drain away as JJ puts her mind to easing the tension and Garcia puts her… everything… into getting everyone sloppy wasted. They’re a terrifyingly efficient pair, and Reid’s a terrifyingly light drunk.

“So, Hotch,” Emily says, sidling over to him and seeing his ear tilt around to face her, eyes still locked on Garcia trying to teach Reid how to shuffle. “You, err… party much?”

“No.” He takes a swig of his beer, long and slow.

She tries again. “Howl at the moon much?”

Now he looks at her. “Stereotype much, Agent Prentiss?” he asks, but he’s smiling and she can smell the alcohol on his breath. Boss man is _druuuuunk_. She has to pretend to sneeze to cover her giggle, burping a little and tasting burning.

Hiding another snigger with a cough and quick mouthful of gin, she answers, “Not a stereotype if it’s true. Do you?”

He doesn’t answer, but he does smile.

They’re interrupted by a shriek and giggling, and she turns to find Morgan tossing Reid into the air with a delighted shout of, _“Bunny ball!”_

“Oh, my god, they’re absolute _kittens_ ,” Emily says as Reid yelps and laughs and hiccups all at once before JJ catches him. She lowers him, scowls at them warningly, and steers the wobbly hare away from the shamefaced Garcia and still-grinning Morgan.

And Hotch just laughs.

She wakes up the next day with a hangover on JJ’s couch, and Reid is curled up against her tummy with his paws over his nose, snoring. There’s tinsel wrapped around his ears. Actually, there’s tinsel wrapped around her tail too. She picks as much off as she can reach without waking the snoring hare, and then peers over the back of the couch. Morgan’s on the floor down there, unconscious and covered with a baby-blue blanket that barely reaches his stomach.

There’s also tinsel on his horns.

“Wonder if they decorated Hotch as well,” Reid mumbles into the couch cushion, his back legs kicking out as he stretches with a yawn. She’s envious of how glorious that stretch looks, right to his fluffy toes spreading out wide and popping slightly. At least until: “Ow. _Ow._ My head, _why_ , ow…”

“Go back to sleep,” she suggests, lowering herself and closing her eyes to do just that. “Not worth being upright just to see Hotch with sparklies on him.”

“My eyes hurt too,” he whines, and curls into a ball.

Just one of her paws almost covers him completely when he’s curled up like this. She does so, hearing a stifled laugh from under one of her pads and feeling warm, damp air blow across the sensitive skin. “Better?”

“Much,” comes the muffled reply. “Thank you.”

 

* * *

 

When Emily started at the BAU, she learned a lot of things very quickly. One: it’s okay to ask for help. Even if that help comes from a smart-ass long-eared hare with an addiction to sugar-loaded coffee. Two: it’s okay to care. Especially when allowing herself to care means that she’s suddenly part of the weirdest family ever. Three: never underestimate anyone. She learned that last one well because she knows how much it hurts to be underestimated.

But maybe she learned it a little too well. Because she stopped underestimating Reid, and right when she let her guard down, he got hurt. Hurt worse than a two by four to the head. Hurt worse than she knows how to fix.

She can’t help but feel guilty about that.

On the darkest day, she spills coffee over her paw and she’s stupid and small enough at the time to think that’s a notably terrible thing. She’s still grumpily rubbing the scalded patch when she slinks back into the room where Hotch and Gideon are hunched over their profile. Gideon looks up, his eyes tired. She never knew a sable antelope could look so damn exhausted; even his horns are drooping.

“Where’s Reid and JJ?” she asks Morgan, because he looks the least worn, and she really doesn’t want to be stuck in the same room as Gideon with that scowl and Hotch with the way his hackles are bristling.

“Interviewing Hankel,” Morgan says, his mouth twitching unhappily. “They’ll be back soon.”

They’re not. But the team keeps it together because they have to, because it’s their job. They find JJ, alone and bloodied, and surrounded by the bodies of three canids Hankel had driven mad. Emily looks at the snarls still on their faces, and feels sick. Rabies. He was infecting them with rabies and using them to kill. They would have died anyway, died horribly, but she still grieves for them and for the families who’ll be getting the worst kind of ending to their ‘Missing Mammals’ cases. JJ just looks blank and that doesn’t fade, not even when they find traces of Reid’s scent that ends in a bloody patch on the ground.

They keep it together until the first video. Then Morgan gets mad, Gideon looks haunted and Hotch… Hotch goes still. He goes still and cold and Emily remembers once again that once upon a time, wolves hunted. Some still hunt. That’s why they have their job. To hunt the ones who refuse to let go of that past and take the opportunities for peace that Zootopia offers them. Reid’s in danger because of his belief in their job, their mission. Because of his belief in Zootopia.

“We’ll find him,” she tells Hotch softly when he brushes past her and she smells fear in his scent. He stops, his paw hovering above the floor as he waits for her to continue, and his tail is stiff and bristling. There’s anger in his scent as well, a leashed kind of rage. She understands that more than the fear. The fear is crippling. The anger… the anger brings with it her claws flexing and her fur prickling and the reminder that Hankel is an aardwolf, just an aardwolf, and if he turns his back on her she’ll be the predator that walks away.

But it’s hard to remember to be more angry than afraid when watching their friend muzzled and chained to a chair, his ears flat against his skull and nostrils flaring red. His silver-brown fur is streaked with blood and foam, one hind paw bent crookedly, and there’s a blank kind of terror to his eyes that screams _prey_. She can’t handle that blank stare, the one that comes with the blown pupils and the lightning-fast twitch of the muscles under his skin as every inch of sense flees that clever, wonderful brain and leaves him a brainless creature focused only on _running_. That stare is anathema to her. It reminds her of how hard they’re failing. He’s a hare and he’s alone, and they’re supposed to _protect him_.

“We’ll find him,” she repeats, stronger this time, and Hotch lets his paw fall and his muzzle curl back into the barest hint of a snarl.

“We will,” he agrees. “I _promise_ that.”

And they do. Find him, that is.

But not before he dies at Marshal Parish.

Emily rides with Hotch on the way there. Hotch is hunched over the wheel and his ears are flat against his skull, turning his profile sleek and mean. He’s the closest to fury she’s ever seen him.

“Hotch,” she says once, glancing in the side mirror for the car behind them to make sure the rest of their team are following still. “He’s alive. Hankel resuscitated him.” She’s not sure why she’s suddenly become the voice of reason here, but she always did compartmentalize better than most…

“Hankel _killed_ him,” Hotch growls, the words emanating from deep in his chest and all the more dangerous for having done so. “He’s a member of my _team_ and Hankel _killed_ him.”

He says team but she hears pack, in every inflection of his voice except for the actual word. He doesn’t need to say it bluntly for her to understand.

“He brought him back.”

Hotch doesn’t answer, and she wonders if this is the day she’s forced to stand between her boss and his anger.

She wonders if she even wants to.

 

* * *

 

The cemetery is silent even as their flashlights dance about it. Reid’s scent is thick in the air, made bitter by blood and fear, but so is the rank stink of cooking offal and the acrid smell of aardwolf. They fan out. Morgan and Gideon bring up the rear, their hooves harder to muffle. JJ takes to the side, silent as a mouse but her light fur catching the moonlight and illuminating her all too easily. Emily hunts by Hotch’s side, two shadows through the trees, and both silent and deadly. They hear the soft gasp of a pained breath, and they move faster.  They see the grave first, the half dug grave. The stink of wet dirt in the air. They see the body second. The bullet wound is dead between his eyes.

Reid is sitting next to the body, his ears hanging ragged and dirty down the side of his head and his eyes blankly staring. When Hotch straightens with a soft, _“Reid,”_ the hare looks up. Emily’s heart twists at the sight. And she prepares; with that look in his eyes, he’s not going to recognise them as his team. He’s going to see a wolf and a jaguar and he’s going to be gone before they can stop him.

He staggers up, the gun that, just an hour ago, had been pressed to his skull slipping out of his paws to thump dully against the loam. And he doesn’t run. He doesn’t run at all. What they get instead is a croaked: “I knew you’d understand,” as he takes to four paws to limp towards them, one back paw twisted grossly.

Hotch reaches him first. Emily isn’t even surprised when the stoic, untouchable wolf with the expressionless face drops to his knees and tugs the shaking hare into a hug that lingers.

It would be nice to think that the nightmare ended in that moment, as the wolf hugged the hare, but Emily watches with eyes suited to the dark as Reid says his final farewell to the aardwolf that had taken him. She sees the bottles that passes in a second from Hankel’s pockets to Reid’s, despite the speed that the hare has mastered in his years of learning magic.

She doesn’t say anything then, but she doesn’t forget. Not then, and not after, when the doctors tell he’s _okay_ and _you can visit him_ and she can’t help but think that maybe they weren’t so right about that first statement. At least, not _all_ of him is okay.

He’s tiny in the hospital bed, which isn’t a surprise because he’s basically tiny _everywhere_. Well, it is a little bit of a surprise. “Didn’t have a bed in your size?” she asks, nudging the door shut with her hip after double-checking her tail isn’t in the way. He shrugs, the motion jerky and odd. At least one part of him is usually always twitching, bouncing, jiggling, if not _all_ of him. She can’t count the number of times she’s seen him hop twice around a room just to get his brain working or caught him staring intently at a map with his hind paw rapping out a fast beat on the ground below. But now he’s still, completely and irrevocably still, and it scares her enough that she can feel the fur down her spine lifting under her shirt.

“Bed shortage,” he says softly, hunching deeper into the thick sheets and almost vanishing. “Easier to get a hare into a big bed than a rhino into a small one.”

She didn’t bring him flowers like Penelope did, or a bag of funny shaped carrots like Morgan did (not because Reid likes them, but because they knew it would spur him straight into the ‘hares don’t actually eat carrots’ lecture. She makes a mental note to ask if it worked). She puts the wooden puzzle she _did_ bring him onto his bedside cupboard and he doesn’t look at it. “When you feel up to it,” she says, deliberately looking away so he doesn’t feel pressured, “I have no idea how to solve this thing. And Morgan’s got money on him working it out by the end of the week.”

The sheets rustle slightly as Reid turns his head, interest sparking in his eyes despite his determination to be a sulky little thing. She closes her eyes, leans back, and settles in for the long haul. There’s no sound but the soft huff of his breathing and the tick-drip of the IV in his arm.

“You’re staying?” Reid asks finally, his voice hoarse. “Why?”

“Staying until you tell me why you took the drugs from Hankel,” she says straight away, and doesn’t open her eyes to see his shock or horror. “And where they are so I can stop you from doing the damn dumbest thing I think you’ve ever done.”

He inhales sharply, almost angrily. “You don’t need to protect…”

“Damn right I do. Look what happens when I don’t?”

“I can solve this on my own…”

“But why? We’re here. We want to help.”

Silence again. She opens her eyes. He looks _pissed_ , and not just because she won’t let him finish a sentence. When he starts talking sense again, she’ll let him finish. But until then… “Reid,” she begins, leaning forward and pretending not to notice the puzzle he’s turning over slowly in his paws, nose twitching minutely. “Spence. Do you know how many friends I’ve had in my life up until now?”

“The average person has about—”

“Okay, don’t actually answer that. Three. I’ve had three, and never at the same time. You’re the fourth. And I’m not here because you’re a tiny little shit, or because you’re a hare, or because you’re mouthy and never know when to shut up to save your life.” She ignores his startled-and-slightly-hurt expression and charges on. “I’m here because you’re my friend, and friends protect each other. No matter if they’re hares who don’t know better… or panthers who _should_ know better.”

The puzzle clicks and falls apart in his paws, solved. It rattles as he hands it back to her, dwarfed by her paw.

“Melanistic jaguar,” he says finally, and doesn’t take his paw off of hers. “Side pocket of my back, inside the blue-bound book. Em? Thank you.”

She doesn’t take her paw away. He needs to know she’s not going anywhere, not for a long while. “Yeah, well,” she replies, looking out the window so he can’t see her whiskers trembling. “If it wasn’t me, Hotch would have been in here. He’s not stupid you know.”

Her only answer is a soft laugh, and she treasures it.

 

* * *

 

She’s one of the last out of the Bureau one evening, at least she thought she was. She steps out into the sharp chill of the night, and Hotch is leaning against his car watching the clouds skate across the darkling sky.

“Reid’s looking better,” he says quietly as she walks up to him, and his tail waves slowly in the breeze. He flicks his ears, leans his head back, opens his mouth. He’s tasting the air and she does the same, feeling the night move around them. They’re alone.

“He’s got a lot of support,” she answers, and leans against the car next to him. Her tail moves slower than his, curling where his waves, but their shoulders brush together. “He’ll pull through. He’s stronger than we give him credit for.”

Hotch glances at her, his gaze soft and dark. “I was wrong,” he says suddenly, standing upright. “When you began here, I said it was a mistake. It wasn’t. You belong here.”

How can she answer that?

She can’t, not around the emotions that seal her throat and bring an almost embarrassing rumble of pleasure to her chest. Jaguars don’t purr—Reid once lectured them at length on why—but she’s foolishly close to wishing she could. The moon breaks from behind the cloud-cover, throwing silver light onto their dark fur and glinting off the cars around them.

“Thanks, Hotch,” she says finally, and he nods and waits until she gets in her car before walking away. Always protective. And she thinks about how far she’s come. She’s friends with a ewe whose fleece changes colour every week, and a maned wolf with eyes blue enough to drown in. Somehow, she works with a buffalo who’s become more like a brother than a co-worker. Her best friend is a hare and that doesn’t seem to matter as much anymore as it did at the start either.

When she’s around the corner, she rolls the window down to let the fresh air in. For a second, she thinks she hears a wolf howling, alone and forlorn on the wind.

Or maybe it was just the breeze.

Her boss is a wolf, and that’s okay.

Because she’s still a part of his pack.

**Author's Note:**

> **Edited August, 2017.**


End file.
